I thoroughly agree. I thought that was awesome and made it more realistic. One of the things I like about Batman is that he's a normal human being (like Ironman) and not genetically engineered or supernatural etc... The Hong Kong sequence accentuated this aspect for me.Originally Posted by Erin
Loved how Batman proved he's international, going to Hong Kong to bring back a crook.
TheBeamisHome, I was with you in knowing that Lister (Zeus) wasn't going to push the button.
I truly enjoyed the movie. I thought Ledger's Joker was easily the best characterization so far. I was disappointed with the makeup though. The Joker never had a painted (or permanent) smile. He had ruby red lips and had a big smile. The smile of a maniac. It's just exaggerated in the comics. Aside from that, I had no issues with The Joker.
Two-Face was wasted in this picture. That is my biggest complaint. He is just as big a character as The Joker and just as important to the mythos. They took a great character and basically threw him away with this film. They could have kept him alive and had the makings for the next feature. That story could have written itself. Such potential, and such waste.
I was disappointed to see the character of Rachel die (and happy too, she knew too much) but it was well used to further the Two-Face character.
It was good, and it was the better of the two stories so far by Nolan, but it could have been more. Like its predecessor, it was overly convoluted and long. I am not opposed to a lengthy film, but when I'm looking at my watch to see how long it's been going, that means the story had started plodding. I can easily name five films that did not result in me looking at my watch the first time I saw them. 300, The Notebook, Seven Samurai (204 minutes running time for that one), The Last Samurai, and Where the Heart Is. As you can tell, this is not just a list of action films. Rather, it is a list of films that held my interest with good story, good acting, and good STORY!!! I just wish they had done more culling with the story and concentrated on one thing rather than adding as much as they did and creating chaos with the plot. This isn't like the comics, we can't go back and re-read the section that we misread. The film moves on regardless if we like it or not or understand it. Just my thoughts.
I had high hopes. The movie delivered on many levels, but failed on a few too.
All in all, worth your time to see it in the theater. Worth your time, your money, and the gas to get there. You'll enjoy it. BUT... I think this film will be better the second or third time I see it. I'll be waiting for the dvd for more viewings.
Margaret Emmie Mackey Catoe, you are, have been, and always will be my soulmate, and I love you.
Con todo mi corazon, por todo de mis dias. And I always will, in this life and into the next.
August 2, 1947 - September 24, 2010
I didn't think any villain was ever on the same level as Joker. Every other villain comes secondary to him... except maybe Ra's al Ghul
Human kind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one and only truth.
Have you ever read "The Long Halloween"? Harvey Dent/Two-Face plays a big role in that story, and it cements his status as one of the MAJOR Batman villians.
Margaret Emmie Mackey Catoe, you are, have been, and always will be my soulmate, and I love you.
Con todo mi corazon, por todo de mis dias. And I always will, in this life and into the next.
August 2, 1947 - September 24, 2010
mmmmmm..... idk.... i guess he should be since he and Bruce were friends before, but i've just always thought that Joker was Batman's arch-nemesis.... but Two-Face.... idk... but i haven't read that Halloween one tho so...
hey anyone here read No Man's Land?
Human kind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one and only truth.
Oh, that was no ordinary prisoner, That was Tiny "Zeus" Lister, (Also known as Debo from the "Friday" movies), in an awesome cameo, making this movie even cooler.
Zeus:
Ah, you beat me to it.
If anyone has read Dark Victory,Spoiler:.
I always viewed Joker as the archnemesis and Two-Face as the distorted image of Batman.
I've read Dark Victory. Liked The Long Halloween much better, but that one was good. Of course, The Killing Joke is best of all, and much of Ledger's inspiration came from there.
I never read the comic books, but I'm wondering how faithful any Batman movie was to them... I'm guessing not much. Most movies have only vague resemblances to book/comic plots (Harry Potter movies take the "vague" resemblance to a whole new level).
Loved it. I think my panties were wet this whole movie. Geez.
I loved the monologue with the Joker when he was in Harvey's hospital room.
I am an agent of chaos.
Probably one of the best monologues I've seen in a long time.
I loved Bruce Wayne running his car to save the Gordon and the whistle blower in the police van.
Gordon: That was a brave thing you did right there.
Bruce: What, trying to beat the light?
So cute.
Heath Ledger killed the joker performance. I was telling Aaron, I always loved Jack N's Joker, but I think that had more to do w/ watching Batman as a kid. But Heath Ledger's joker was scarier. He was more real.
I loved the little pop in of scarecrow and the fake batmans (batmen?).
A true firewasp ninja would never wear such a ridiculous sweater.
There's logic in nonsense.
Give me all the bacon and eggs you have.
Dark Victory and The Long Halloween were great, Haunted Knight was....ehhh...
I agree with this
Human kind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one and only truth.
The film isn't out here yet i don't think, which is a bummer 'cause i go away this weekend so i doubt i'll be able to watch it until i get back
2:45 am- 11th February 2008- I Finished The Dark Tower
So Batman beats his mother?
The kindness of close friends is like a warm blanket
Wait...are you referring to something Two-Face/Harvey Dent did? If so, excuse me since my knowledge of Two-Face/Harvey Dent is limited to TLH and DV.So Batman beats his mother?
I'm just saying that the actor that plays Batman was arrested this morning for beating his mother.
That's what I heard anyway
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=672044
The kindness of close friends is like a warm blanket
WTF...
Fox News has a bit different story - he was released on bail.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,388124,00.html
hmmmm... who to believe...
Human kind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one and only truth.
Maybe they refused to tell him where the Joker was hiding -
WHERE IS HE?!
I just posted the first random link I found on the internet. Not sure of the source and all that.
I saw the story originally on Fox this morning (America's News Room)
The kindness of close friends is like a warm blanket
Batman and Joker: They are nothing without each other© July 20, 2008
By Hank Stuever
I'VE BEEN THINKING lately. About you and me. About what's going to happen to us, in the end. We're going to kill each other, aren't we?"
That's the Batman talking, a couple of decades ago, to his archnemesis, The Joker, in the opening pages of a graphic novel that changed both of them and made their relationship more wonderfully sick.
Usually The Joker is the one who articulates the nutty co-dependence here. Almost every time they meet, Joker has the gall to remind Batman that they are each nothing without the other, and he usually brings this up as Batman is kicking the heck out of him, in an almost erotic moment of sadomasochism. Joker loves it, laughing his head off with each punch. (And Batman loves it, yes?) The world doesn't quite understand, even though these two have been going at it for 68 years.
"To them, you're a freak," Heath Ledger's Joker tells Christian Bale's Batman in the just-opened "Dark Knight." "Like me."
As if Batman didn't have enough problems, around which entire dissertations have been written. But the problem of Joker, the cruel terrorist with the appalling clown face, has nagged him in one way or another since 1940. Writers and artists (and filmmakers, and actors) adore The Joker because the narrative dynamic is so arresting, as a pure visual: The guy in black is the good one? And the clown is the bad one?
Sometimes, especially in the 1950s and '60s, their tangles were built for laughs. (Oh, that Joker - spray-painting priceless works at the Gotham Museum of Art!) That was about as interesting as going to a cheap circus.
Later, in the '80s, Joker story lines and depictions got scary enough that you didn't want to sleep in the same room with your comic books, but none of his antics ever trumped his infamous calling card: a joker from the deck, left on corpses. Corpses with frozen stares and frozen smiles.
From the first, the makers of the early Batman comic books felt Joker should be a mass killer, and that there shouldn't be any reason why he kills, other than it introduces anarchy into Batman's world. This was awful to think about back in '40s America, when there wasn't a serial killer with a new fetish greeting you in every bookstore and on the screen. A killer clown, imagine!
"Batman" creator Bob Kane and others took their cues from the 1928 silent movie adaptation of Victor Hugo's "The Man Who Laughs," starring Conrad Veidt as the tormented soul with a garishly immobile smile that had been carved onto his face as a child. The plan was to kill Joker off in an issue or two, but, as comic book legend has it, the last panel of Joker's debut story was redrawn on deadline. That way, he could escape death and return sometime later.
Joker came back again, and keeps coming: as an elaborately prankish bank robber in the 1950s, as Cesar Romero's buffoonish baddie on the "Batman" TV series in the '60s; as a deranged post-Carnaby Street dandy with Charlie Manson undertones in the '70s.
Once the best comic books grew up and became graphic novels, the cruelty and psychosis of Joker became fuller and more terrifying. Instead of becoming more of a cartoon, he became quiet and deliberate and that's where he got creepy. There was a lot more blood.
The world has become much more accustomed to anarchy as a form of trendiness, and in a way The Joker is a symbol of that. Also, it helps his case enormously that people have a special, deep loathing for clowns. (Thank you, John Wayne Gacy.)
Batman pays a visit to Joker's cell at Arkham Asylum, that Gothic criminal mental ward on the outskirts of town, in the opening pages of the classic 1988 graphic novel "Batman: The Killing Joke."
"Perhaps you'll kill me. Perhaps I'll kill you. Perhaps sooner - perhaps later," Batman tells his foe, starting to sound like he'd banged bongos in a men's support group. "I don't fully understand why ours should be such a fatal relationship... "
But The Joker isn't listening.
He's just playing solitaire. The Joker isn't listening because it's not really The Joker, it's a jail-cell impostor. Batman grabs him and runs a finger over the face, and the white makeup comes off, and now he knows: Joker is on the outside, escaped again. In every Joker story this is always the best moment. He is not where you think he is, and the joke's on you.
Finally, in this re-evaluation of Joker, there is the obvious matter that the actor playing him in "The Dark Knight" died in January, not long after completing the film.
In all the fretting about whether this would affect the marketing of "The Dark Knight," people found it very difficult to say the awful, Joker-like truth: We like it better because of it.
Batman, the vigilante: so yesterday.
Joker, unhinged, bringing death: so today.
Who needs whom the most now?
PS, This is my favorite movie in the history of the universe.
I kind of think that Bale's mom and sister probably said something retarded, and he probably got pretty pissed off, but I think if he had actually hit someone they'd be holding him. A man that big hits you, you're gonna have a mark to show to the police.
I don't know, maybe it's just that I've been a huge fan since we were both little, but I think it's total crap. Or at least not nearly the big deal they're making it.
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